Shanghai

My studio mate was pretty insistent on getting me to research Chinese musical instruments, find one I like, and have him pick it up for me on one of his business trips to Shanghai. I finally got around to doing a little investigating and settled on the Pipa. I'd forgotten I'd made the choice until I started getting a flurry of emails from Abe. Turns out the pipa is larger than Abe (or I) had expected; and, as Abe put it, it sounded bad ass.

Abe was a little concerned about getting it back to the States and I'm sure he went through a few hoops to get it done. At that point I'm pretty sure he was more excited about the purchase than I was. I met him at the studio to pick it up. We spent a few hours playing with it and the zheng Abe picked up for himself then we headed our separate ways and I decided to take the pipa home to mess with it a bit more.

I'm not sure when I noticed Lien-Hua, the girl that came with the pipa. It might not have been until we got out to the car and I heard the passenger door shut. Or maybe I'd always noticed her but hadn't thought about what to do with her. She would need to be fed, sheltered and all that after all. And the wife might have something to say about keeping the pipa. It was late though and I didn't see much alternative but to get her home and figure it out in the morning.

Lien-Hua was hungry. She didn't say anything of course but when we got home she went straight to the kitchen and looked around until she found a bag of rice (we only had Basmati), some soy sauce and beef flavored ramen. She cooked all this stuff up while I was taking a shower and then she offered it all to me. She didn't touch a nibble until I'd had my fill. It was the best rice I'd ever had and when I was done I noticed she'd spent her time cleaning up the kitchen until it was cleaner than when she started cooking.

I took her upstairs where the guest room is and gave her a white towel. I opened the upstairs bathroom door to show her around a bit. I don't know if she took that as a hint or whatever but she was naked and ready for the shower in the blink of an eye. I turned on the shower, explaining that the hot water took some time to get all the way up to the upstairs shower. I cupped her breasts in my hand and we started to kiss. The bathroom was full of steam when we made our way into the shower where I made love to her for the first of four times that night.

On the fourth go, I could tell she was pretty tired. I left her sleeping in the guest room and slipped down into the master bed with the wife and child --too tired myself to worry about the morning encounters. I woke up late to the easy mundane sounds of activity in the front room. The child was talking to her toy ducks and there was the sound of clinking china, certain kitchen activity.

The wife did give me a look but it was contained and brief. She was relaxed, sitting up at the counter with a hot cup of tea. Something delicious was simmering on the stove. Lien-Hua was kneeling by the sofa, attentively listening to my daughter who was showing off her dolls and ducks.

Lien-Hua gave us both warm oil rubs that night and it was as quick as that that her presence in the master bedroom was unquestioned. Although usually the wife and I would venture to Lien-Hua's room for sex --the distance from child being the thing.

Lien-Hua rips it on the pipa but I'm coming along nicely with her support. I'm not sure how we got along at all, pipa or no pipa, before her.

The song you loved the most

Your body is probably being cleaned by someone right now, or it's laying on cold aluminum with a white blanket tucking you in for looks. It's only called bathing when you are still breathing. If a medical examiner wasn't in the same village, then maybe your jaw was tied shut when it locked up 2 minutes after you passed. Your face was strangely no longer yours- losing waves of microscopic patina in a tsunami of violence and saying goodbye in a way that I don't think you would have approved of.

They are scrubbing you with loofahs and alcohol, and then they are drying you off with hospital blue- tight woven towels which they have used on body after body before you- which will be laundered and thrown back into the circuit tomorrow after your hard skin has been released to family.

Maybe they are being gentle with you since your death. Maybe they aren't. If they liked you, I imagine a lengthy and beautiful ceremony- where they gingerly turn you and treat your genitals with dignity and sponge them with some kind of rich bitch salve, as if your now dead eyes could still see and your heart could still pump blood into your brain hard enough to make you shame them for taking short cuts with the final shower of your life- and only using 99 cent store vaseline to slick your unkempt hair back.

With a spirit squinting dead-like through eyes that shine no more, let me ask you... would using old roses from someone else's sad goodbye offend you after all you have been or would you laugh and thank us in death for treating you to your own funeral with limited funds?

Does it matter how they handle your flesh when you are dead?

I didn't wait hungrily for you, grandfather, to come home to us from my makeshift backwoods crib, bored and wanting to learn- like my father did. I didn't watch you scrub the kangaroo blood from your elbows in a gasoline tub out back. I didn't smell the whiskey on your breath when you threw me up in the air and telepathically conveyed that you loved me in some way. I never heard you sing the song you loved the most.

I took a nap today. I stopped by a party and saw old friends and strangers who looked like old friends doing the same shit that old friends did, but they were stand-ins in a dream. It was raining and I was fucking around with some umbrellas in a mud room, trying to figure out if I should even be at the party. The juke box had this one song that I had to play though, even if I knew I should be getting the hell out of there... Everyone was an asshole. Everyone was wasted. Everyone was on their own path. I became frustrated and left after making sure there would be no violence because of me. I left there with one regret. I never made it to the song.

You were there though, in monumental fashion for the first time, and I rowed you out into a night tide with my daughter. You made me leave you both there in the waves, and I had to find the strength in my despair to make it back to land without dying in my grief.

I assume that I made it back in a pitching midnight madness.

I wish you could have heard the song that I loved the most, before you had died.

I Wanna be Free to Not Ride

The guy down the street had a cougar. My friend Joe knew this much like he knew all other kinds of useful crap about our neighborhood. I was relatively new to the place, and left to my own devices I would know practically nothing, and would have happily gone about my day playing Atari and watching kung fu movies. Joe introduced me to things like skateboarding, surfing, reggae, punk rock, using your vocabulary without being embarrassed and, of course, 'Ripides. 


The guy who owned Rip should have seemed a creep, but he had two kids around our age and Joe insisted he was on the level. Still, hanging out at Richard's place was a bit of a challenge when it came to selling it to your mom. It's not easy convincing your mother that the forty-something guy down the road has a badass cougar in his backyard that he often lets run free in the house, and that he also has a game-room in his loft with full size pinball machines. Any mom worth her salt is smelling child rapist from miles away. Somehow I managed to convince my mother that the guy was not into my ass, no doubt in large part thanks to his actually meeting my mother and her meeting his children.


Never mind that his kids were much worse a threat to our livelihood than the fucking cougar. Those kids were pretty damn feral all on their own when it came down to it. For one, they raced motorcycles with an absolutely reckless abandon. Their lack of consideration for the survival of their family line glared through the moment they reluctantly strapped on a helmet. This led to the great motorcycle incident of '82. 


I never was the kind of kid who fearlessly leapt in harm's way with little care for personal safety. No, I was the kind of kid who hated eating ice cream from a cone because I was too concerned with avoiding the sticky sensation of having any dry on my fingers. I regarded motorcycles as rumbling icons of danger, never to be trusted. And I regarded guys like RIchard's kids as minions of the devil, sent to earth to corrupt innocents such as myself into the bidding of their dark lord (dad in this case). 


So here it was, the day that Richard thought would be the best of all days to let Joe and me give the dirt bikes a whirl on the old suburban pavement. For me, this meant certain death. 


I knew damn well that nobody was ever going to master the art of not dying on a motorcycle when their all-consuming thought whenever getting near a running one was not to shit their pants. Call that innate knowledge. I was on it. But those fucking little demon spawn and their pushiness. I was too young to tell them no. It wasn't even an option to me. It was time to die. 


I would like to add, as an aside, that my brother hopped right on the thing and blazed about the place as if the bike was an extension of his confident ego. All this from a boy no older than seven. Joe was up next, which I already knew was a no-brainer since Joe already had experience on bikes. And then it was my turn. 


I managed to get on the bike and still keep relaying the message to my asshole to keep it in check. I sat for a moment in abject mortal terror. The eyes of Richard, Joe, my brother and the spawn fixed on me in glassy anticipation. I even thought I heard a slight growl of delight creep from the backyard. Predatory mammals always sense the presence of imminent death as if it really were cloaked in hooded garb, ready to throw down on the chess board. I couldn't back out. Backing out would have been worse than the glory of a violent, fuel-soaked death. It was time. 


I let out the clutch, gave it gas, more gas, the gear engaged, more gas, TOO MUCH GAS! And the fucking thing took off from under me. I was performing an impromptu wheelie, but unlike the acrobatic maneuvers of stunt men, the only part of my body still touching the bike was my hands. I was now literally running behind the bike. Best of all, I was headed directly into the path of a busy street with plenty of traffic in both directions. 


If you've ever been waterskiing then you are familiar with the suicidal urge that grips those inexperienced riders who fall but for whatever reason never think to let go of the rope, and thus are dragged through the water like a broken doll, flopping around, waterlogged and ridiculous. It's hilarious to watch but really painful to do. I know, I've done it. Twice. Once on water, and, joy, once on a motorcycle!


I pulled the wheelie all the way across the busy street, clutching the handlebars with a death grip so tight, you would have had to break my fingers to remove them from the bike. All this time I was still running as fast as I could. I could hear those bastards behind me yelling to "Let go!" repeatedly, which no doubt seemed sensible to them, but was well behind my sphere of influence. 


And so I ran my way directly between two lanes of oncoming traffic, narrowly avoiding being crushed in what would have been the most pathetic auto-motorcycle accident in the history of the universe. Upon reaching the far curb, the bike slammed into it and the two of us, the agent of the devil and the little terror-ridden child crashed to the ground in a bruised heap of metal and shame. 


How I wished I had indeed died that day. It would have been superior in every way to the nightmare of having to face the leering mob rushing towards me in an obvious mix of concern and hilarity. 


I've been in two more motorcycle accidents since then. One actually within about a hundred yards of the one mentioned above. I was on the back of a bike that flew through an unpaved edge of a bayou. We hit a giant hole in the ground, grown over with tall grass and virtually invisible to the naked eye. I learned the joys of roadburn that day. The other wreck a side-effect of being behind a friend that managed to forget the bike behind him at the traffic light. He suddenly realized he needed gas, slammed on the brakes in front of us and we, having no time to react, slammed into his rear bumper, going forty. I re-familiarized myself with the pleasures of roadburn that day, and also discovered how to flip in mid-air, be as bruised as possible without actually breaking anything, and best of all, I learned how roll several times across the road into - wait for it - yes, oncoming traffic and bust out an ad-hoc stunt man roll into a standing position that must have looked planned to the stunned onlookers at the gas station. 


To this day, while I love the idea of motorcycles, I also know that tempting fate is something with which I have a rather spotty history. Best to leave the motorcycles to the pathetic, desperate yuppie assholes who think bikes make their dicks longer, people without children, crotch-rocket jockeys who pull miles-long wheelies down freeways at night on their way home to sexually abusing themselves in the mirror and those rare few who actually respect the power of bikes enough to make a lifetime of enjoying what they have to offer. I mean, you've gotta know your limitations.